1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to back-translation, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for providing feedback of the quality of a translation using a concept-based back translation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Back translation is important for providing people with feedback regarding the quality of a translation. Previously, for interlingual-based translation systems, back translation has typically been achieved by generating back the source language based on the interlingual representation. However, when state-of-the-art translation systems have shifted to employ the data-driven statistical approach, where no interlingual representation is available, most of the back translation provided by such systems is obtained by using a real back translation scheme. That is, the same translation scheme is used to translate the translated sentence back to the source language.
Therefore, the back translation produced in this way not only contains the error of the forward translation from source to target language but also the error from translating from the target language back to the source language. To make the situation even worse, most of the translated sentences are not grammatically correct, which makes the backward translation even more erroneous.
Therefore, current back translations contain many more errors compared with the real translation in foreign languages. In particular, people may find the translation wrong when the actual translation to the foreign language was actually correct, which cause people to reject correct translations.